


in lieu of fractals

by Rigil_Kentauris



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Healing, Trauma, and avatar solutions!, avatar issues, everybody's dying bitch let's get you some fruit, repeated non-permanent character death, well healing of a sort. the "please dont try this at home" sort, when you dont beta things that really really ought to have been beta'd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:01:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26465329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rigil_Kentauris/pseuds/Rigil_Kentauris
Summary: People fret over breaking into Sannikov Land. One assumes the leaving is the easy bit, but really, it's the other way around.Some things just don't want to let you go.
Relationships: Helen Richardson & Michael Shelley, Michael & Helen Distortion, Michael Shelley & Gabriel | Worker-of-Clay
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19





	in lieu of fractals

**Author's Note:**

> _#when you dont beta things that really really ought to have been beta'd_ "why dont you just GET a beta then??" look. look. look do i look like the kind of person who could withstand the mortifying ordeal of being known to you. john could compel me to tell him my name and i would shatter like glass next question

The thing of it is, he’s forgotten how to _be._

Right. Okay. Here’s the thing: he’s laying in the snow for a week before he realizes that he’s laying in the snow. Two weeks before he realizes it has been one week and three more before he realizes it's been two and a half. By the time a fourth weeks rolls around he’s up to sync, except, he’s dead, because thirty days without food, well-

Right. Okay. Here’s the thing: he’s human now?

He is…

He is then-but-not-then, and then, he is here-but-not-here, and there he is lying in the snow for four weeks. He’s asleep. He’s awake in the snow.

“Hello?” someone says, obsequiously. Obstinately? Curiously? There is a dimension in which these things rhyme.

He lifts his head out of the snow, then puts it back down, then realizes he’s got a body. One that feels queasy and confining all at once.

He may have promptly thrown up. The voice-and-the-arms may have picked him up.

“Oh dear,” says the arms and the hands.

Michael – is he? - frowns. Take a step back – he’d been _dead?_ No – he’s in the snow. No, he’s-

“Hush now,” says the someone, and then what-once-was-but-is-no-more is still.

-

“I found you in the snow,” says Gliny, who is a person with hands, and legs, and presumably, a voice with which he speaks. “You were there for some weeks before we could get to you. By them time we did, you were dead. We retrieved you, buried you, and then you reappeared again some days later. More tea?”

Words are signs attached to sounds attached to symbols. And you don’t know any of them.

Tea is water. Water is…?

Kaolinom sighs. “Don’t worry, little one. You’ll be linear again soon enough.”

You’d believe him, except, of course, this is right around the same moment when he buries the knife in your chest.

“Terribly sorry about this,” he says, and once-again you are no-more.

-

There is snow. Yes. It is cold, it is wet? Dry?

“People do not have the tactile ability to distinguish between states of matter in this regard,” Prakhov says.

Helen cross her arms and folds her legs and folds her legs as she sits on a plane of existence that is only technically a doorway if one is being petulant and rude.

“Because are known, of a kind, these things to me?” I ask towards them, and they light up with delight and malice and fondness. Perhaps are these things the same?

“He speaks,” she says.

“Only technically,” he replies.

“This is terrifically tedious,” she says.

“No,” he scolds. “It’s terrifically linear.”

“Humans,” she says.

“Indeed,” he agrees.

“Am I sorry?” I ask, and they both shake their heads, simultaneously.

“Not yet.”

And then, this time, it is frostbite that curls up and makes the world of now go dark.

-

“We have to get the Distortion out of you,” Helen says, matter-of-factually. "The method may not be elegant, but…"

You swear, which is strange, because you don’t swear. Not at home, in private, and certainly not in the middle of a crowd in the middle of a grocery store. One where the aisles… don’t seem to be functioning.

“Who are you?” you say. You are reaching for your keys. You’ve been told you can use them as a weapon, if you put one between each of yours fingers and make a fist. People don’t have claws, and that is a design flaw in which you will not indulge when you are her-

Your head splits in two. It aches.

“Hm,” she says. She stops playing with the sensor of the sliding door that is affixed to the wall fifty paces away. “Waiting for all of this to go one after another was, well, you can imagine!”

She laughs. Parts of your split head fall. You hold them in your hands and pieces crumble and speckle down to dust. It’s a beautiful sound. It’s a shattering sound. You laugh too, but, you are also crying.

“I suppose it was working, though.”

She sighs.

“Ah well. You never were all that interesting, anyway.”

She picks up your hands in hers. Her palms feel like clumps of wet snow. Like molten earth. Like the want-and-want-not lump of red and blue in your throat.

“Please…” you manage, in a whisper.

“Oh, fine.” You don’t know what you’re asking for. She doesn’t sound pleased.

She puts a hand over your face and then you _bleed._

-

“The thing of it is,” says Michael, hovering in mid-air a little bit to the left and behind the derivative of where he lays, “is that they’re trying to make you remember how to _be.”_

He grins, wide and besotted with fractal edged teeth. He shudders in his place in the snow.

“We wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

Does we? It _is_ very cold here, after all.

“You can make them go away, you know,” Michael says, casually. “This place is _mine,_ after all.”

Is it? No, it wa…

Was?

The Michael that is floating flashes all at once. He’s ringed with fury. His eyes aren’t wide, they are fevered. His fingers aren’t sharp, they are bladed. He _will_ kill him, and this time, there will be a _point_ to it.

“Now, now,” says Michael-without-purpose, “there’s no need to get temporal with me.”

There is, in his mind, a picture of this-place-is-no-was. An island that was a fog, a dream. A milky swaying dance that convinced one Not To See, Not To Know. No, this place isn’t his. This island isn’t his. He never would have found it on his own. He knows that. In this semisolid memory, there is _someone,_ standing there. Eyes, sight. A kind, _caring,_ person who’d placed an arm on his shoulder and-

Broken Michael hisses, and whirls into motion.

He’d wanted time? He’d wanted pain? He’d get it.

Broken Michael’s chest heaves as he stands over the sticky pieces of what’s left of him.

This time, there is _screaming,_ as he dies.

-

He has forgotten how to be, yes. But he hasn’t forgotten how to run.

He huddles behind a rock and peers out at the two assembled figures.

“Hm,” says the changing man.

“Idiot,” says the frightening woman, and stalks along the footprints Michael has left. He backpedals on the ground. He’s fast, but this is Sannikov. She reaches through the world and picks him up and deposits him back in the snow as if he were nothing.

He quivers there. He doesn’t know these people. He doesn’t know what they want.

There is a whisper, though, quiet and fierce in his head.

_You do know, though._

_Don’t you?_

-

“I won’t,” he says.

-

“Never!” you claim.

-

I laugh, and they run.

-

It’s one week before you understand that time is passing in this chase. It’s two before you recognize you’re tired.

It’s three weeks before you realize you’ve started counting.

-

Helen sits on the ground next to where I lie. She has her arms wrapped twice around her knees.

It’s silent for a long, long time. Or maybe none at all.

She rakes a finger through the snow. “I… just want you to feel better.”

“I can’t,” I finally say. “How did that work? What’s more? What’s less?”

She rests her head on her knees. She turns it to look, and breaks several things which don’t exist in the process.

“I didn’t mean to, you know.”

“That which is and isn’t,” I eventually reply, and she nods.

It’s silent for a long time and no time. My skin is cold and wet, and also, so is snow.

“I want to go home,” I tell her.

In a rare showing, she smiles, and it doesn’t terrify me like it should. “I understand.”

Then her eyes light up.

“Oo!” she says. “Maybe…”

-

The first one hurt your head too much, and so, in a show of concession, they put the next door flat in the ground, so at least it _seemed_ anchored.

“Go on!” Helen says. The claymaker merely watches, silently.

You’ve been sat there for a half an hour, with a hand extended towards the handle. It’s starting to ache. It’s probably the simplest doorknob Helen could have manifested. Round, clean, brass-gold that is shining and gleaming, and bright, and aching. It hurts to look at. It feels like home.

“Go on,” she repeats, more quietly this time.

You take a deep breath. You summon all that’s left of your courage, and brush your fingers on its surface.

You grab it.

You turn it.

It’s locked.

This time, you don’t let the hands that reach for you arrive. You scream, and let go of even the _pretense_ of obeying time.

-

His flat is covered in dust, in layers upon layers of it. Enough that some of it is sticky. Enough that the fractal spiderwebs in the corners have become laden and heavy and deadly to their passengers.

He runs a finger along the cabinet. He gets a splinter, and that hurts, but it hurts more that this place doesn't _recognize_ him. It’s not his. It doesn’t twist and rise and contort to greet him, not like- not like it-was-not-what-it-was.

Somewhere deep inside him, broken Michael rails violently against the thought of being contained within four walls. It feels like be clawed apart from the inside out, and his knees buckle. When Helen moves to catch him, it feels like being clawed apart from the outside.

Crying hurts. Crying _hurts._

_-_

He gets shot walking up to the Archives. Part of him thinks he deserves it. The other part wakes up, tears Sannikov apart, and then drops senselessly into the snow.

-

Lydia Halligan is dead. André Ramao freezes and then runs. Robin Lennox just looks up quizzically and asks if you want to pet the dog.

Well… you don’t _not_ want to pet the dog.

It’s… fuzzy. Warm.

It’s a kind of nice.

It’s a kind of hell.

-

Gabriel spends his days knitting together Sannikov’s frozen earth and frozen water into something that is neither, and both. He spins the lumps of earth and water into that-which-he-uses, and molds those lumps into that-which-he-makes. You join him one day. The stretch and pull of clay feels almost like you used to, back before you were what you were. No. No, it feels like…

“Change,” you say.

Gabriel nods silently.

You change the liquid clay into solid rectangles. It isn’t that original of a shape, but rectangles can stack. And you can stack them. When you’re done, the bricks have formed an even larger rectangle. You poke it. Broken michael pokes it. It doesn’t fall over, and it also stays exactly where it is.

-

Snow is cold. Snow is dead. And when you lie in it, you are…

Your skin tingles.

-

Helen hovers in the air. This is persnickety, persistent, pernicious. Obnoxious. You know these things with authority, because you used to _be_ these things. You can almost remember it, if you want to.

You smile, gently. She frowns.

“You don’t have to be so smug about it.”

“I know,” you say.

Gabriel smiles less and less, and more and more.

“But I want to,” you explain. “I want to be.”

Helen huffs, and makes an empty show of leaning further into her hallways.

You kneel in the surf. It is the coldest thing you have ever felt in your life. Your reflection ripples in the distorted mirror of the water’s surface. And it _is_ you.

It is a simple matter to reach into the water and _feel_ Sannikov’s heart beating underneath you. In-between you. Halcyon ribbons that flutter through impossible twists. The sensation tries to hurt you, but you pat it gently, and let it rest.

“I’m ready,” you tell it.

The michael that you are looks at you from the surf with sad and fond finality, then you grasp the threads of Sannikov, pull slightly…

And break them.

It has started snowing. He nearly trips over a chair in the dining room in his haste to get outside.

The flakes fall on his face and melt, over time. Each one leaves a spark of cold where it melts, and the water tracks down to pool and refreeze when it joins the snow on the ground.

He exhales, and the clouds of vapor curl through the sky.

It doesn’t take long before he’s shuddering in the cold, though. He pushes himself to his feet, and with one last farewell at the empty space around him, heads back inside.


End file.
